The Human METAR

IT’S OVER!

The second semester of my graduate career is over! It feels pretty good to have one year of graduate school completed, and knowing that in one year I’ll receive my masters degree is both exciting and scary!

I have a couple of weeks to relax, move out of my apartment and prepare for my trip to Florida. I will be leaving for Florida on June 3rd and hope to be down there by June 4th. My first day at Cape Canaveral is June 8th, and that’s when I will begin my thesis research.

If any of you would like to see some of the work I have done, see the links below. I will be updating my website tomorrow to add these projects (and remove the weather lab link as I don’t have to do that again! ).

Radar Meteorology Project: Updating some results from Andrew Loconto’s Thesis. He created a radar gust equation for the Cape Canaveral Area to forecast for the speed of wind gusts. I validated this equation across the US and suggested new equations.

Advanced Stats Project: Using a 13-Year Dataset, my colleague and I found ways to determine a convective event at Cape Canaveral using many different Statistical projects.

Also I would like to announce that I have finally joined the twitter network. I find it just as good as plurk. Plus a lot of more famous people are on it (Like the weather channel and Boston’s NBC cheif meteorologist Pete Bouchard). You can follow me here

10 years ago today one of the worst tornado outbreaks in the United States occured. On the evening of May 3rd, 1999, 66 tornadoes were reported in Oklahoma and Kansas, killing nearly 50 people.

The biggest tornado to touch down was evaluated as an F5 tornado, and blasted through Moore, Oklahoma…just 10 miles north of the OU campus. Here is what the supercell looked on radar imagery. If you wanted to know what a supercell looks likes…this is probably the best example out there (SOURCE: Wikipedia):

The sounding that morning (approximately 12 hours before the tornado outbreak) indicated favorable conditions for tornadic supercells (SOURCE: Plymouth State):

This sounding is a perfect example of a loaded gun sounding. What do I mean? Well the red line is the environmental temperature, in other words, what the temperature is as the weather balloon goes up. Notice near the bottom the red line shifts sharply to the right. This indicates a strong temperature inversion, or a “cap”. Now this sounding was taken at 12 Z which is approximately 7am in Oklahoma. If you can get daytime heating of the surface during the day, then you might be able to “break the cap” and create an extremely unstable atmosphere, which is conducive for severe weather.

Also note the thermodynamic values at 7am local time:

• CAPE: 1099 J/kg
• Lifted index: -2.1
• TT: 48
• Sweat Index: 297

When daytime heating occurs, those values are likely to get higher (or lower in the case of LI), which can help create an unstable atmosphere.

Also notice how winds are turing clockwise with height. This is an indication of strong verring wind shear, which can help structure a cell to become a supercell, and in this case, a tornadic cell

So we have an unstable atmosphere, now we need two other ingredients: moisture and a lifting mechnasim. We can get those two by looking at the 850mb map (SOURCE: Storm Prediction Center)

The brown lines are isoheights. Notice the sharp cyclonic “u-shape” area just west of Oklahoma. This is an upper level trough, which can act as a lifting mechanism. Also notice the green lines. These are areas of high Dewpoint. The blue wind barbs indicate that the southerly flow is bringing a moist airmass into the area. This is what we like to call a “low-level jet”. This day is a classic example of “how to create tornadic supercells”

While May 3rd is considered a holiday for some meteorologists, we must remember that people’s lives changed that day. Over the past 10 years, improvements on weather detection, such as high res models (RUC, WRF), and advances in radar (MPAR, CASA, Dual Pol) have been created to warn the public of these kinds of events. While we have gotten better, more work needs to be done, and I hope to be a part of that somehow.